Now we know why our Punahou-educated president feels so comfortable in a kindergarten classroom:

President Obama compared the Republican budget plan to a “stinkburger” or “meanwich” during a speech here Wednesday, using a series of zingers in an attempt to strike a contrast with the GOP on economic issues in an election year.

In a speech to an enthusiastic crowd of 1,400 at the University of Michigan, Obama repeatedly mocked Republican ideas about how to improve the economy, as he touted his own proposal to raise the minimum wage.

Obama, who visited the local Zingerman’s deli before the speech, said that Republican proposals to cut taxes for wealthier Americans and federal investments in education, as well as replace his federal health-care program, would harm the economy.

The GOP has proposed the same ideas so many times, Obama said, “It’s like that movie ‘Groundhog Day,’ except it’s not funny. If they tried to sell this sandwich at Zingerman’s, they’d have to call it the stinkburger or the meanwich.”

Hard to know where to begin with one. The uncritical use by the reporter of the term “federal investments”? A “crowd” of 1,400? A “series of zingers” from the Commander in Chief? “Mockery” from the bully pulpit? Can it be that Obama really doesn’t listen to himself, weigh his words, or respect what, pre-Clinton, we used to laughingly call the “dignity of the office”? Surely somebody wrote those lines for him; this is, after all, a man whose forays off-prompter often end in disaster:

More likely, he simply doesn’t care. His glide path to the presidency has been marked by one thing in particular: no one has ever said “no” to him about anything. He went to one of the most exclusive (and, if you’re into racial bean-counting, whitest) private prep school in Hawaii, then skated through Occidental, Columbia and Harvard while leaving nary a mark or a memory. More than five long years into the Obama presidency, it’s clear that his sense of the job is entirely confined to its ceremonial aspects — parties, vacations, junkets — and to campaigning, which is the only thing he’s any good at.

And yet, to this we’ve come: a country in which style trumps substance, to the cheers of the media. And does Obama ever have style: from the moment he delivered his famous speech at the 2004 Democrat convention as an obscure state senator running for the U.S. Senate, I knew he would be the party’s next nominee, and that he would probably win. The only thing that might have blocked his ascension was Sarah Palin, and once the media recovered from the shock of her nomination and acceptance speech, their knives bloodied her badly — with John McCain, of course, doing nothing to defend her. Indeed, I parodied the reaction in my viral NRO piece, “I Hate You, Sarah Palin“:

But she’s not a Democrat, which despite her va-va-va-voom appearance, means she’s not really a woman, which is one of the reasons we’ve spent the past four days since McCain unveiled her trying to tear her limb from limb. Just because she’s the governor of a state sandwiched between two obscure and unimportant countries, Canada and Russia, and spent more time in her first five minutes visiting American troops in Iraq than Evita Barry did during his entire Rainbow Tour, what could she possibly know about foreign policy? It’s not like she’s John Edwards or something.

So that’s why we’re having our Wellstone Funeral Moment at the moment. We mean well; we promised ourselves we wouldn’t go over the top with our outright loathing of the Neanderthals who preach “Christian” values while practicing Wiccanism and child sacrifice and who hate black people and gay people and want to destroy the environment just because they can, and want to amass more money than even John Kerry or Jon Corzine or Herb Kohl or Jay Rockefeller or Dianne Feinstein — the five richest senators — or Ted Kennedy or John Edwards or Nancy Pelosi have. That, usually, is the Kos Kidz’s job. Along with speculating exactly how Bush got from My Pet Goat to planting the depth charges that blew up the levees in New Orleans.

But sometimes the mask slips and you can see — whoops! — how much we hate you. Normally we’re against hate in all its forms, and embrace tolerance as one of our defining moral attributes. But when it comes to you conservatives, well, with the best will in the world, we just can’t tolerate you. You’re elitist, you’re judgmental, you’re hypocritical, and we know that deep down you hate us even more than we hate you. Therefore, by any means necessary, we will defeat you this fall. Voter fraud, “walking around” money, legions of lawyers, as many recounts as it takes — bring it on!

So why we should be surprised at “stinkburger”? As Lucianne.com drily noted on its post this morning, What next? Republicans are “poopyheads”?

Dead wrong. After the Tet offensive failed (and it failed miserably) Ho Che Minh was ready to negotiate terms of surrender. It was only the anti-american informants in the administration and the MSM that convinced him to hold off.

Ho che minh died a year later.

Leftist in congress promoted legislation that ended with the War Powers act in 1973. In the following months, more people died in Vietnam than during the entire war. A gift from the left. In the vacuum the killing fields in Cambodia also began.

Millions upon millions died. A wholesale slaughter brought to you by the Democrat party. You know them, the anti people people.

How I stumbled and fumbled when a simple man, a young black mechanic, asked me, "So what are we doing there?"

Right to the heart of the matter.That was during my rah-rah phase.

Actually, a favorite fantasy is still Bush announcing that the bomber fleet is on the way, with Mecca as the first target... he then leans forward, with a murderous stare, and says, "NOW dance, motherf****ers"

Notice how the president spends a lot of time in places where people haven't fully developed their political ideas (or lived in the real world on their own for very long) or military bases where booing the president isn't the best idea of the century?

I wish one day that the USA stops in its tracks and starts to retreat into itself again. To heal itself. To strengthen its economy and its military. To rebuild its culture and society. To not give anyone reason to fear it. But, in case there is a country or a people that does not fear it or ignores it own self interest, to be faced with complete and total destruction. "Bombed back into the stone-age" if you will as I think General Curtis Lemay once said.No "occupation", no "boots on the ground", no "nation rebuilding". Just complete and utter devastation. Let those peoples or country suffer for the arrogance of their leaders. If there are Americans that would whimper over "propotionate response", send an EMP and shut everything down and let the population deal with its leaders.How did we ever get to a point where absolute surrender was NOT THE POINT? Call me crazy, I guess.

Most of my lineal ancestors served in Wright's Brigade, Anderson's Division, Longstreet's Wing then Hill's Corps, Lee's Army, so I know a bit about this subject.

Grant and Sherman WON the damned war! They won it by understanding modern warfare as warfare had come to be defined in the 1860s. Lee was a masterful leader; his men would have charged Hell with a penknife for him. But, Lee won battles, at least until the end, and Grant won The War.

Lee never had or even attempted to have an overall strategic view of The War. Granted: it wasn't his job until the very end when it was hopeless. Lee was the commander of the Army of Northern Virginia and Lee protected Northern Virginia superbly as long as he had the resources to protect it. When Lee could not longer protect Northern Virginia and attempted to lead his Army to the hinterlands, he found that the hinterlands had been denuded of Confederate assets and there was no sustenance and little support for his Army.

Lee brought the "flower of Southern manhood" to the ANV, and left the other armies with what was left. Were that not bad enough, Lee cast off those he found "inconvenient" to the other Armies. When Georgia Governor Joe Brown demanded Gen. Johnston's head for his ceding so much of Georgia to Sherman, Lee offered up John Bell Hood who should have been discharged for disability. Instead of Johnston's slow, calculated resistance to Sherman as he tried to keep Atlanta in Confederate hand until the '64 election, the Confederacy got Hood's aggression, and he wildly threw his Army against Sherman and utterly destroyed it. Sherman presented Atlanta to the Union and ushered in a second Lincoln term. I don't think The South could have won The War under any circumstances, but any hope that it might have had was finished with the fall of Atlanta and Lincoln's re-election. If that weren't enough the laudanum-addled Hood simply finished off his Army at Franklin, TN with charge after stupid charge. So much for the Lower South.

So, you want to define "greatest general." Lee was a superb battlefield commander. Grant won the War; Lee didn't.

I recently viewed a cable TV produced program on Lee and Grant that summed up this discussion rather succinctly. Paraphrasing, if you wanted a brilliant tactical general, select Lee; if you wanted a brilliant strategic thinker, select Grant. I agree with this assessment but would add that Grant wasn't much of a slouch tactically, either.

>> I don't think The South could have won The War under any circumstances

All it had to do was not lose. What good did invading Maryland and Pennsylvania do for the Southern cause?

Longstreet was the best battlefield commander on either side. As for generalship, Vicksburg and Chattanooga were masterful, as was the chase of the ANV from the escape from Petersburg to Appomattox which Grant directed, not leaving the final chase to Meade who was the titular head of the army.

"Gravitas" used to be so important to the lefties, once, for about five minutes!

Obama uses childish, low-brow rhetoric because he has a childish, low-brow mind. He's middle-management smart, at best.So this black Babbitt says stuff like:"all wee-wee'd up"“[Republicans] can come for the ride, but they gotta sit in back.”"But I don't want the folks who created the mess to do a lot of talking. . . . I don't mind cleaning up after them, but don't do a lot of talking."

Mussolini for Morons is a good affirmative-action intellectual -- meaning, no intellectual at all.

B.O. leading our troops from a position of weakness, of not believing in the mission and hampering them at any aspect of letting them win.

Frank contrast to Grant, Sherman and others, that knew that war is hell, and the best way to win it, is to wreck that hell on the enemy and try to make the war as terrible as possible for the enemy, which is the best way to make the war the least terrible for your own troops, because they then have a clear cut mission to win. None of this B.S. by B.O. about declaring a war over with no clear winner.

"Style over substance" sums up way too much anymore.............What might be particularly distressing is that the ____-in-WH will remain comfortably secure, untouched, and unaccountable in a kevlar bubble wrap cocoon the rest of his life paid for by the taxpayer victims of his _____ and with $Ms coming in from his hidden supporters, sycophants, idolaters, and enablers. Using our tax dollars will the U.N. make him SecGen just to spite us? I was so looking forward to his absence from the news. Dignity - shignity. His disdain for America is deeply frightening.